Literature and Nostalgia

This chapter surveys the history of modern literature through a selection of its most prominent engagements with nostalgia and delineates the mechanics of a nostalgic literary aesthetics. The appearance of nostalgia correlates strongly with the history of modernity and modernisation, but nostalgia did not suddenly appear in literature in the modern era; modern writing’s nostalgia is an acute example of a phenomenon that has always been part of literature. This chapter thus opens with a brief discussion of the history of nostalgia in literature but focuses on modern literary nostalgia, as well as exploring how literature as a specific media type engages with nostalgia. This chapter then discusses some of the most important trends in recent scholarship on literary nostalgia and summarises different theoretical approaches to the nostalgic analysis of literary works. This section includes ecocritical, postcolonial, and migrant analyses of literary nostalgias, as well as considerations of certain nostalgic trends: Victorian adaptations and transmediations, as well as the recent wave of 1980s nostalgia. This chapter delves into the poetics of literary nostalgia, or the wide variety of aesthetic strategies that have been used to trigger nostalgic literary experiences, before concluding with a brief discussion of the future of literary nostalgia and its entanglements with contemporary culture and politics.